Blue Owl Capital leads $2.4B debt deal for Iren Ltd. to buy Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs

Iren Ltd. just secured $2.4 billion to go shopping for some of the most powerful chips on the planet. Blue Owl Capital led the financing package, announced August 28, 2026, with Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) co-participating, to fund Iren’s purchase of Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs for its Mackenzie data center campus in British Columbia, Canada.

The deal is split down the middle: $1.2 billion in senior secured term loans and $1.2 billion in senior secured notes, both carrying a fixed 9% interest rate and maturing in 2.5 years. Draws are staged to align with hardware delivery, meaning the money flows as the chips arrive, not all at once.

How you finance a data center without selling your soul (or much equity)

Iren is using its incoming GPU hardware as collateralized infrastructure, essentially borrowing against the chips before they’re even plugged in.

This is Iren’s second major debt raise in quick succession. On June 1, 2026, the Sydney-based company closed a $3.65 billion investment-grade GPU financing facility tied to a Microsoft offtake agreement. That deal was notable because it came with an investment-grade rating, a signal that traditional credit markets are increasingly willing to treat GPU fleets as bankable long-term assets. The August deal carries no such investment-grade designation and sits at 9%, a meaningfully higher cost of capital.

From Bitcoin mining to Blackwell Ultra: Iren’s full pivot

Iren started life as a Bitcoin miner. The company is now targeting 480 megawatts of AI cloud capacity by the end of 2026, spread across sites in Mackenzie, Prince George, and Canal Flats in British Columbia, with additional campuses planned in Texas. Its total development pipeline stretches beyond 5 gigawatts.

The projected capital expenditure for fiscal year 2027 sits at up to $30 billion.

Markets were not entirely convinced

Iren’s share price fell roughly 13% to $35.40 on the day of the announcement.

The August financing is not tied to a named customer anchor in the same way the earlier Microsoft-linked deal was. What Blue Owl and PIMCO’s participation signals is that institutional credit markets are treating AI infrastructure as an asset class, with the 2.5-year maturity implying either a refinancing assumption, a monetization event, or enough revenue generation from the GPU fleet to retire the obligation before 2029. Iren’s ability to hit its 480-megawatt capacity target by end of 2026 will be the first major test of whether that timeline is realistic.

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